


that i should rise and you should not

by jonphaedrus



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Classic Mode Mechanics (Fire Emblem), Dissociation, F/M, Graphic Description, Grief/Mourning, Multi, POV Second Person, Past Character Death, Past Relationship(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:46:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22890466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: Here is what they do not tell you: war will haunt you, all the rest of your long life.
Relationships: Gunter/My Unit | Kamui | Corrin, Joker | Jakob/My Unit | Kamui | Corrin, My Unit | Kamui | Corrin/Silas
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14
Collections: Nagamas Gifts





	that i should rise and you should not

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> happy belated nagamas!!! i'm not entirely 100% sure if this is what you had in mind with angsty f!corn fic, but given what you wrote _me_ for nagamas, i figured this wasn't totally off base.
> 
> f!corn is a good girl, and she deserves happiness. i refuse to play revelations because she deserves better than that. fates is a bitch ass game.
> 
> title is from [the parting glass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parting_Glass), and the particular rendition i listened to while writing this was from the celtic world orchestra

Here is what they tell you: war is terrible. War is hell. War is inescapable. War fills up every nook and cranny of your world. It eats your home. It eats your friends. If you survive and claw your way back out the other side, war has chewed you up and spat you out, wounds still dripping.

War changes you.

Here is what they do not tell you: warwill haunt you, all the rest of your long life.

After the war, you cry exhaustion and retreat to the Northern Fortress to convalesce. The world will keep turning without you—Nohr and Hoshido have shattered royalty, but the government is the government. Even as Xander and Ryoma beg for you to rejoin them, you huddle smaller and smaller into yourself until the four walls of your old bedchamber rise as tall as the parapets beyond your window.

Only a year ago, this room was a jail cell, now it is a refuge. Loneliness was your constant companion, but you were never _alone_.

Silas came to visit you, once. He came to visit you and then when you stumbled out, unsure and wearing blisters into your feet, he found you and you rode behind him on his horse, your hands wrapped around the reassuring solidity of his chest. Silas, with his quick smiles, his dedication to you no matter what your future might hold. Silas, who had ridden beside you into battle even when he did not believe in what you fought for.

Silas had come to you once, here, in this great keep and its hallowed walls. And then he had come to you many times, a rescuer, a knight on a horse. He had come to you in your room at the castle, and had professed love at your knees, his hands burning hot under the leather gloves of his armor.

But you do not hear these words in the echoes of your footfalls through the empty halls of the Fortress.

You hear him spurring his horse on, hoofbeats pounding underneath you as you hold tight to the saddle, unpracticed on horseback. You hear the rattle as your teeth clatter against each other, echoing within the caves of your skull. You hear his rapid breath, panting. You run down to greet guests at the gate, and your feet on the flagstones of the hall is the pound of hoofbeats and the thud of his heart.

When you turn the corner, you always think you’ll see him, reigning up in front of you. There’s always a moment where it’s not his horse stabled, alone, at the foot of the fortress, free to roam the grounds in search of his owner.

He is never there when you turn the corner. He is always, forever, slipping just out of your grasp as he turns, looking over his shoulder, tosses you the reins, and slides off of the saddle and out of your arms. When you look around the corner you can see him, a solitary armored figure, spear drawn, wind catching in his hair, the broad cut of his shoulders faced towards you. A moment, frozen—

When you blink, it’s gone, and Silas is only in your memories as a ghost, that final moment burned into your heart. The pursuing calvary thundering into him as a wave, and the scream he gave as they rode him down, cut short by the deafening crunch as he was trampled beneath hoof after hoof.

You write to Xander, and ask to have the fortress carpeted from bottom to top.

When you come back to this place you once called home, the first thing you do is go to the kitchen and empty every cabinet. So much of the food has gone bad—a year or more unoccupied, mice have eaten into the grain, there is mold where once sat produce, even salted meat has spoiled and been coated by a carpet of flies. This must be disposed of.

The tea, still dry in its boxes and tins, is untouched.

You fashion a dust mask from an old rag like Jakob taught you, stuff your nose with cotton, and fill crate after crate with tea. You take them down, one by one, to the castle grounds, dig a ditch with the rusted-out old shovel you found in the groundskeeper’s empty, dusty shed.

You pour the leaves into the ditch one box at a time. You do not look at the labels—if you did, you would know the smell, the taste.

Insomnia is not new to you; it is an old friend, worn wearying by its presence over so many years, the one companion that has been with you all your too-short life. You have no memories where sleep came at night with anything that approached ease or virtue. Jakob was hardly older than you were when you first came to the Northern Fortress, and he was the first to realize it—how you would toss and turn, haunt the halls as a pacing, fragile specter in the dark hours of the night.

How many nights in that old life did you sit up until your eyelids were so heavy you could not lift them, helping Jakob steep one after another small cups of the newest tea sent with your provisions, laying them out on trays with every possible addition? All of those nights and all their teas lulled you into a routine of reassurance, a promise night would not accompany horrors, but time with friends.

How many nights did you do the same in the castle, as Jakob took you to the kitchens, and you steeped cup after cup of tea together? How, at first, you would discuss the outside world, your growing family and friends, and then battle tactics, wartime strategy. You would talk of international politics; trade deals, treaties, truces, how to hold your own when kings and queens brought you to task for not securing peace at any cost.

And still, you would set the cups and prepare the milk, the lemon, the sugar, and Jakob would pour the tea into each one, murmuring ingredients beneath his breath. Bergamot, rosemary, orange peel, rose hip, hibiscus, matcha, lemongrass, cranberries, black tea, oolong, chai, grapefruit, vanilla, lavender. Tell you where each tea came from. How he had found it. How long to steep it.

You empty all of them, one by one, into the ditch. You shake the leaves out, and do not smell any of them—do not remember any one night, any one conversation, but all of them. You do not remember any one touch, any one kiss, but all of them. His hands on yours, guiding you. His body against yours, grounding you. His chin on your shoulder, a reassuring weight as he stood behind you, a body of your own _outside_ your own.

Mechanical actions that became rote. Boil. Brew. Steep. Drink. Boil. Brew. Steep. Drink.

Boil. (Jakob growing paler and paler over months, then weeks, then days, his hands beginning to tremble until you took the pot from him, and just let him move your hands as if they were his.) Brew. (Old wounds resisting over-used healing magic, at first not closing and then beginning to fester as he moved slower, hung back behind the front lines, stalked in your shadow instead of at your side.) Steep. (Jakob not able to walk or rise, infection burning as a fever in his body, wrapping tea leaves as poultices and then the clouding, burning stench as they grew soaked in blood and pus, the scent revolting and overwhelming as Jakob lay in your bed, fighting an invisible enemy, infection boiling in the air of your room just like the water would in the pot). Drink. (Lifting the cups to Jakob’s lips, praying that maybe _this_ tincture would change something. How he had at first drunk willingly, smiling at you tending to his every need; later how his glassy eyes had not seen you, staring into the distance when they rarely opened, his parched, dry lips cracking as you poured tea in, one half-mouthful at a time, and prayed he would not aspirate on it.)

The leaves are old and dry. It takes less time for the fire to consume them than it does to steep a single cup of tea. The smoke fills the courtyard—you cannot escape the stench of it, your eyes watering from the heat and from your tears as you remember his rattling breath. Each one slower. Each one softer. Until they stopped.

You write to Xander, and ask for only coffee to be sent from now on.

When six months have passed, you open the armory. You open the doors and you stand there and stare into this empty, silent room, coated in dust. You smell the old leather and naked steel.

You close the door, and do not open it again.

When two years have passed, you open the armory again.

You do not get the door all the way open before you close it, crying. You are crying, like a child haunted by the clash of thunder, and you cannot bear to do it. You cannot bear to look into that room, into that hollow, empty chamber, and remember what was once inside it.

When five years of peace have grown grass over the graves of the buried, you blindfold yourself and you throw the doors to the armory open. You cross the eighteen steps to the windows and fling them wide, the cold Nohrian air of late-autumn chilling the room in minutes, wind cutting through the thin cotton of your sweater.

When you are ready, you tear off the blindfold and look at the room. You pant for breath, shaking, gasping. Rage and fear, anger and anxiety, anguish and the exquisite agony of grief hit you as a wave, leave you trembling, your hands impotent fists at your sides.

It is a room. Against the three interior walls are racks of weapons, grown dusty with cobwebs from years of disuse—spears, lances, axes, swords, daggers. Your martial training (yes, even no small number of books, no doubt eaten by silverfish) is writ in the discarded objects of this sepulcher, the bones of your childhood decaying here in this cloister.

Nothing moves, nothing but your panting breast. Nothing stirs but that brushed by the wind.

There are no ghosts here. You do not see Silas’ back or hear the crunch of bones and armor, the scream and muster of hoofbeats. You do not smell the stench of Jakob's putrefying flesh and rotting herbs, taste the myriad overflowing notes of fresh-brewed tea, steam bursting against your soft palate. You do not feel the fleeting sense-memory of touch, warm physical contact that reminds you of a time long passed.

You see nothing but an empty room and the too-rapid rise and fall of your chest. You hear your own broken, ragged breathing—hyperventilating, high and manic in your own ears. You smell dust, must, cobwebs and decay. You taste fresh air. You feel chill. Chill, and nothing else.

Silas’ ghost stalks the courtyard, flickering at the edge of your vision when you twist over your shoulder. Jakob haunts the kitchens and the china, remembered meals that sometimes burst to life in your mouth and turn your food into ashes.

Gunter is not here. Gunter, your first love, your girlhood crush and obsession, your protector, your guardian, your weathervane and your stormbreak, is not here.

Gunter is dead. Gunter left no ghosts, left no memories. Just an empty space, where he should have been at your side, a faded impression lost to treachery and the old, unbearable stain of _bad blood_. Gunter is gone, and so is your innocence, which could maybe have stayed intact had the world been just a little kinder in what it stole from you.

The dragon veins sing to you, but you do not answer their clarion call. Destruction in the form you got _from those who robbed you_ will be impersonal, unfulfilling. It will only create greater gulfs, your impotent hands grasping helplessly at trickling streams of water only to have it drain between your fingers as you clutch it even closer. Sand will sink from beneath your feet, and you will never be able to feel the hurt, the _catharsis_ , that your own two hands can give.

There is a hammer leaned against the wall, all metal, too heavy for your arms before the war. You could barely budge it, let alone pick it up, no purpose for the kind of martial prowess it would take to heft such a weapon and strike with it. In those days, you had watched Gunter do drills with the thing, his deft ease with so great a weight leaving you breathless in the way that only the cusp of _knowing_ could do.

You had once watched Gunter lift it one-handed, settle its heft as a counter-balance against its weight, and tried to block it with a simple iron blade. Your distraction had been your undoing, and he had admonished you—but all you had been able to do was watch the way the muscles of his shoulders and arms moved, the _maleness_ of his human form.

Now, you lift this cursed thing with the same ease, one simple weight in one hand. Had it really been so heavy, once upon a time, in that other life? Had it?

Tears burn your eyes as you swing it and smash it into a suit of armor. The armor rattles, clatters, dents. On the next strike pieces begin to fall.

By the fifth, the armor is shattered. You turn to the weapon racks, and beneath your swings, powered by six years of grief and rage, of unfulfilled hopes and dreams, of your stolen youth and your forgotten childhood, your two ruined husks of families, the wood and iron begin to crumble. Your screams are raw, primal fury, the same sounds that twist from your warping throat and lungs when you transform.

But now they are solely yours. The pain is not physical. The sounds, the hurt, the open weals and wounds that drip blood and festered pus, they are all yours.

Spear and axe hafts become matchsticks and toothpicks beneath your strikes. Blades bend, warp, and break. Stone gains cracks, grout crumbles to dust. The wooden racks become flotsam and jetsam, tossed on your raging current and crushing tides. Your throat wears raw and your voice breaks into ugly, blinding sobs before you finish the room, as you break every single glass window, pounding against the lead windowframes until every last piece of glass you can reach is shards that cut your feet to bloody ribbons.

When there is nothing left to destroy, you move out of the room and downstairs. The dining room is next: silver and tableware are turned into metal no use even for smelting. Instead of hammering china, you pick each piece up one by one and throw them as hard as you can into the opposing walls, leaving hills and valleys of porcelain inscribing a topographical map of mourning. The crashes of the plates and cups breaking is the same as the breaking of your heart, one bit at a time, over so long you didn’t even notice it until it was too late.

You destroy the rest of the windows next. When there are no windows left, you tear down curtains and tear up bedding and rugs, you find the remains of a sword and cut your palms to bleeding in ripping them all into strips. You break every piece of furniture that stands in the castle. You tear the books asunder, pages fluttering to the ground beside forgotten covers, and as it falls dark, you drag it all into the old armory, empty of anything living but yourself and your remorse, and drench it in the lamp oil.

The funeral pyre catches at the first match, but you empty the entire book into it and stand there as the heat dries the tears from your face and scorches the longest curls of your hair. You stand there a long time, coughing as you breathe in smoke, and only leave when you have to, stumbling down the stairs, your vision turned grey beneath the hanging charcoal pall, pulling your sweater up over your face to try to breathe clean air.

The Northern Fortress of Nohr burns to cinders and collapsing stone, from the roofbeams to the foundation stones. The fire rages higher and higher, flames licking the impossible vault of the night sky, burning brighter than the sun.

Corrin stands atop a nearby hill, holding the reins of Silas’ horse, and watches all that long night, until dawn’s first rosy fingers come and brush shadows over them, dampen the afterimage of the pyre on the backs of her eyes, before she turns, and rides away.


End file.
